Tag Archives: featured

Six weeks on three different expeditions aiding scientists in studying mountain ecology and glaciers. We worked on a half dozen research projects, summiting six peaks in the Cordillera Blanca collecting data.

Navigating thousand meter high granite walled channels barely wider than the yacht; five meter swells, waves crashing over the cabin, crossing the Golfo de Penas; rounding the notorious Cabo Raper in dense fog and rain by radar; to days of gentle winds, gazing at glaciated volcanoes. Continue reading Sailing Patagonia→

El Chalten is a tough place to leave. It is an easy to settle into, close knit, climber community, in a spectacular mountain scene; and it is also surrounded by ice sheet to the west and desert to the east. There is always a day bus to a flight out of Calafate, or one of the monotonous long distance sorts that take you through the night up barren Ruta 40, the highway travelers pride themselves in completing for the sake of completing and little other sightseeing reason. I chose to let the views guide me. Continue reading Candelaria Mancilla, Raw Patagonia→

‘Quien se apura en la Patagonia pierde el tiempo,’ locals say (‘Those who hurry in Patagonia lose time’). We’ll likely be here another week, waiting for the high system to move in and shift our winds around from the South.

These three days are worthy of a full blog post (coming soon): trekking out to Glaciar O’Higgins, staying on a ranch where I was told only twenty a year pass through, in a natural landscape that was right up there with any I’ve seen. Inspiring to experience the traditional subsistence ranching the father and son carry on. The true Patagonia.

If you are going to cross a border, you might as well make it interesting. Argentina / Chile, no phone or computer, only a paper record of who comes and goes. Carried the way too heavy pack for five hours through forest and pass from Lago Desierto to the two home “town” of Candelaria Mancilla.

Alpine climbing Huntington Ravine, Mount Washington, NH. The footage is actually from three different days in Jan-Feb 2012. The climbs include Pinnacle Gully, Damnation Gully and the top-out is from South Gully. Winds on Pinnacle and Damnation were high those two subsequent days in February, upwards of 90 MPH, but conditions throughout most of the climbs were picture perfect, calm and sunny!